[vetinari]

(reacting to your writeup)

- gvfs might not support ws-discovery for smb discovery, but neither does macos. They both support dns-sd/bonjour/zeroconf for that; so getting up avahi up and running with advertising the smb service is the easiest way to handle both. Synology does this OOB, for example.

- gvfs is not an implementation of samba. It is a frontend to libsmbclient library from the samba package. Unfortunately, libsmbclient does read smb.conf and adjusts itself accordingly, without the consumers of the library having a say in it. The best way to debug gvfs problems is to start with empty smb.conf.